BOLIVAR – Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Mo., has released a resource designed to make the Southern Baptist Convention’s statement of faith more accessible to today’s congregations. The “We Believe” project, a series of short videos highlighting the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, was developed last summer.
SBU President Rick Melson expressed his excitement about the resource, saying, “As a lifelong Southern Baptist, I’m delighted that our faith statement at SBU is the Baptist Faith & Message 2000. It is rooted in a long history of what Southern Baptists have always believed and unites us in who we are, what we believe, and what we teach and model at SBU.”
BOLIVAR – Southwest Baptist University released the “We Believe” project last year – a resource to help Southern Baptists better understand the Baptist Faith & Message. (Screenshot)
The 18-part series features SBU students and faculty reading each article of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, followed by short explanations by Ryan Griffith, who serves as Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at SBU.
In an introduction to the series, Griffith notes that the Southern Baptist Convention originally proposed the Baptist Faith & Message in 1925. The most recent revisions of the BFM were adopted in 2000.
“Like earlier confessions, our confession has been twice revised to illumine what the Scriptures teach on issues faced by Baptists in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries,” the church history professor explains. “The Baptist Faith & Message carries on this deep theological tradition, and we should be grateful for the way it helps guard the truth we believe.”
Melson described how he hopes the “We Believe” project will impact both the SBU community and the SBC as a whole.
“My prayer for the ‘We Believe’ project is to create a touchstone that unites us in our work at SBU, to become more distinct in the marketplace of Christian higher education, and to provide a resource to serve churches and organizations within in the larger SBC.”
Griffith echoed Melson’s statement, noting that a clear presentation of doctrine leads to greater unity within the body of Christ, even as it distances the church from false teaching and liberal interpretations of Scripture.
“We created this resource to help our university community see the beauty and richness of the truth we love,” Griffith said. “Our hope is that it will do for SBU what it stands to do for local churches—draw fellow Christians to greater unity around fundamental truths of the Christian faith.
“Despite what others may claim, doctrine unites rather than divides; and my hope is that this resource will help churches understand the origin and development of the BFM and, in a small way, help recover confessional theology for contemporary discipleship.”
Southern Baptists around the world can freely access the “We Believe” series, which has a 90-minute total runtime, by visiting www.baptistfaithandmessage.com.
In addition to the full video, the BFM webpage presents each article separately, allowing churches and small groups to work through the entire confession in bite-sized sections.